The message for Britain between Obama’s lines

The president-elect has shown that oratory, long in decline, can still be a force. Politicians here need to take note

Oratory just isn't what it used to be. It never is. Winston Churchill's reputation as an orator has proved lasting but is very much a post1940 creation. Many of his inter-war contemporaries thought him a laborious speaker who suffered by comparison with Gladstone's moral intensity and Disraeli's foppish glitter. And those Victorian titans, in their time, were clearly not a patch on the polished prose and poised delivery of Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox a century earlier. Oratory's greatest artists tend to be dead before they are recognised, and their epoch, like any golden age, reproaches those who come afterwards.

Barack Obama bucks that trend, since it is the quality of his speeches - and some nifty campaigning on the internet - that has elevated the president-elect to greatness. Many of his devices - the repetition of the same phrase at the beginning of successive sentences, for instance - would have been familiar